Golla grew up in the small town of Mt. Shasta, in the far north of California, where his father was a funeral director and deputy coroner of Siskiyou County. The family moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1952 and he attended high school in Oakland. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1960 and received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the same institution in 1970. Golla taught briefly at the University of Alberta and Columbia University, and then settled in Washington, D.C. for two decades, teaching in the anthropology department at George Washington University and conducting research on the extensive archival documentation of American Indian languages that is housed in the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. In 1988, he was invited to join the faculty of Humboldt State University, in Arcata, California, as professor of Native American Studies and director of the . In addition to his work at Humboldt, Golla has held a series of visiting appointments at UC Davis, and from 2001 co-principal investigator of the He has also served as a linguistic consultant to the Hoopa Valley Tribe, where he has been responsible for creating the Hupa Practical Alphabet and a number of pedagogical and reference materials, including an English-Hupa bilingual dictionary. He is the author of several scholarly books and numerous articles on American Indian languages, including three grammars of Hupa and a 1000-page compendium of the Hupa lexical and grammatical materials collected in 1927 by Edward Sapir. His latest major publication, ' was awarded the 2013 Leonard Bloomfield Book Award by the Linguistic Society of America for being the recently published book "which makes the most outstanding contribution to the development of our understanding of language and linguistics". In 1981 Golla helped found the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, and subsequently served for 25 years as the Society's secretary-treasurer and editor of its quarterly SSILA Newsletter. SSILA has recently established the ' in his honor, to recognize Americanist linguists who show a significant history of both linguistic scholarship and service to the scholarly community. In 2015 Golla was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In selecting Golla, the society cited his "influential research on Native American linguistics and ethnography" and his "outstanding service to the profession."
Golla, Victor. Tututni. International Journal of American Linguistics 42:217-227.
Golla, Victor & Shirley Silver, editors. Northern California Texts. IJAL-Native American Texts Series 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Krauss, Michael E. & Victor Golla. Athabaskan Languages of the Subarctic. In Handbook of North American Indians, volume 6:Subarctic, pp. 67–85. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.
Golla, Victor. A Short Practical Grammar of Hupa. Hoopa: Hupa Language Project, Hoopa Valley Tribe.
Whistler, Kenneth W. & Victor Golla. Proto-Yokuts Reconsidered. International Journal of American Linguistics 52: 317-358
Golla, Victor. Sapir, Kroeber, and North American Linguistic Classification. In New Perspectives on Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality, pp. 17–38. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Golla, Victor, editor. John P. Harrington and His Legacy. Special Issue, Anthropological Linguistics.
Golla, Victor. Hupa Language Dictionary, Second Edition. Arcata: Center for Indian Community Development, Humboldt State University and Hoopa Valley Tribe.
Golla, Victor. Sketch of Hupa, an Athapaskan Language. Handbook of North American Indians, volume 17, Languages, pp. 364–389. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.
DeLancey, Scott & Victor Golla. Penutian: Retrospect and Prospect. International Journal of American Linguistics 63:171-201
Sapir, Edward & Victor Golla. Hupa Texts, with Notes and Lexicon. In: The Collected Works of Edward Sapir, volume 14, Northwest California Linguistics, pp. 19–1011. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Golla, Victor. Ishi's Language. In: Ishi in Three Centuries, pp. 208–225. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Golla, Victor & Juliette Blevins. A New Mission Indian Manuscript from the San Francisco Bay Area. Boletíin, California Mission Studies Association 22:33-61.
Golla, Victor. North America. In: Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages, pp. 1–96. London & New York: Routledge.
Golla, Victor. Linguistic Prehistory. In: California Prehistory. Colonization, Culture and Complexity, pp. 71–82. Lanham : Altamira Press.
Golla, Victor, with Lyle Campbell, Ives Goddard & Marianne Mithun. North America. In: Atlas of the World’s Languages, second revised edition. London & New York: Routledge.
